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Politico has an
article out about President Barack Obama’s increasingly
frequent off-the-record White House meetings with various opinion
journalists and columnists. Here are some named names:

Participants vary depending on the issue of the day, but there
are regulars. [David] Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is a
frequent guest, as is Joe Klein of Time Magazine. From The
Washington Post: E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Ezra Klein and Fred
Hiatt, the editorial page editor. On foreign policy: the Post’s
David Ignatius, Bloomberg View’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Times’
Thomas Friedman. He also holds the occasional meeting with
conservatives. This month, he met with Washington Post columnist
and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, Wall Street Journal
editorial page editor Paul Gigot, and other influential
representatives from the right.

Also named are New York magazine columnist Jonathan
Chait and NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd. No,
Reason hasn’t been invited. Sniff.

More details:

He also likes talking to the people he likes to read. The
president is a voracious consumer of opinion journalism. Most
nights, before going to bed, he’ll surf the Internet, reading the
columnists whose opinions he values. One of the great privileges of
the presidency is that, when so inclined, he can invite these
columnists to his home for meetings that can last as long as
two-and-a-half hours.

“It’s not an accident who he invites: He reads
the people that he thinks matter, and he really likes engaging
those people,” said one reporter with knowledge of the meetings.
“He reads people carefully — he has a columnist mentality — and he
wants to win columnists over,” said another.

These anonymous quotes from the journalists invited to these
off-the-record bull sessions are kind of hilarious.

Sometimes, the aide will then reach out to the columnist to ask
his or her opinion, which has had the unintended effect of spurring
the columnist to write a piece expressing his thoughts on that very
issue.

“It’s like, ‘The president wants to know what you think about
‘x.’ So you go, ‘I guess I better figure out what I think about
‘x,'” one columnist explained. […]

Said a columnist who has attended multiple meetings, “When you
can write your column with absolute surety, knowing that what
you’re saying is a true reflection of what the President of the
United States is thinking, how do you not do that?”

Read the whole emetic here.

Politico has an
article out about President Barack Obama’s increasingly
frequent off-the-record White House meetings with various opinion
journalists and columnists. Here are some named names:

Participants vary depending on the issue of the day, but there
are regulars. [David] Brooks, the New York Times columnist, is a
frequent guest, as is Joe Klein of Time Magazine. From The
Washington Post: E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Ezra Klein and Fred
Hiatt, the editorial page editor. On foreign policy: the Post’s
David Ignatius, Bloomberg View’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and the Times’
Thomas Friedman. He also holds the occasional meeting with
conservatives. This month, he met with Washington Post columnist
and Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer, Wall Street Journal
editorial page editor Paul Gigot, and other influential
representatives from the right.

Also named are New York magazine columnist Jonathan
Chait and NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd. No,
Reason hasn’t been invited. Sniff.

More details:

He also likes talking to the people he likes to read. The
president is a voracious consumer of opinion journalism. Most
nights, before going to bed, he’ll surf the Internet, reading the
columnists whose opinions he values. One of the great privileges of
the presidency is that, when so inclined, he can invite these
columnists to his home for meetings that can last as long as
two-and-a-half hours.

“It’s not an accident who he invites: He reads
the people that he thinks matter, and he really likes engaging
those people,” said one reporter with knowledge of the meetings.
“He reads people carefully — he has a columnist mentality — and he
wants to win columnists over,” said another.

These anonymous quotes from the journalists invited to these
off-the-record bull sessions are kind of hilarious.

Sometimes, the aide will then reach out to the columnist to ask
his or her opinion, which has had the unintended effect of spurring
the columnist to write a piece expressing his thoughts on that very
issue.

“It’s like, ‘The president wants to know what you think about
‘x.’ So you go, ‘I guess I better figure out what I think about
‘x,'” one columnist explained. […]

Said a columnist who has attended multiple meetings, “When you
can write your column with absolute surety, knowing that what
you’re saying is a true reflection of what the President of the
United States is thinking, how do you not do that?”

Read the whole emetic here.

For well over a decade, Saudi women have been
fighting to convince their Islamic rulers to give them driving
rights. But now their argument has taken a strange twist, Shikha
Dalmia notes. They are invoking the same law that has for centuries
subjugated them to argue their case. They claim that lifting the
driving ban would be more consistent with sharia that, elsewhere,
has been used to circumcise them and make them subordinate to men.
Is this a wise strategy?

View this article.

Although the Obama administration has made
enrollment cheerleaders out of the
Baltimore Ravens,
Organizing for America, and the now-disgraced
Chad Henderson, many major unions who were allies of the
president are now treating Obamacare-advocacy like a hot
potato.

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial
Organizations (AFL-CIO), which has over 11 million members and is
the largest federation of unions in the country, is displeased
about the
false promises of Obamacare and refuses to promote enrollment
on the government’s behalf. It’s not just private sector unions,
though. Politico
explains:

The AFL-CIO isn’t lifting a finger to help the White House — it
remains in negotiations at the White House and on Capitol Hill to
change elements of the law it finds objectionable to workers. Those
talks were put on hold earlier this month during the government
shutdown — a far larger concern for the federal government employee
unions — and have begun to restart only in recent days, according
to officials from multiple unions.

Major public-sector unions also aren’t fired up to help the
White House with a law that won’t affect the vast majority of their
members. Nor are they ready to register people who aren’t union
workers for a benefit they won’t receive themselves.

Beth Moten, legislative and political director of the American
Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents over
650,000 federal employees,
said that although the AFGE would like to help, but “frankly,
we have our hands full in everything else, and we don’t have [the]
luxury of getting involved.”

Even the American Federation of Teachers, the largest teacher
union in the U.S., though they have made presentations for their
own members, refuse to get involved in the touting enrollment to
the communities in which they work. Furthermore, they expressed
concerns about how the healthcare system will impact part-time
teachers whose hours have been cut.

The imbroglio began earlier this year when the union leaders
realized that Obamacare was
not actually beneficial to their members and pensioners. The
Teamsters, United Food and Commercial Workers International Union,
and UNITE HERE, which collectively have over 2.5 million members,

sent a strongly-worded letter to the president demanding that
changes be made so Obamacare would not hurt union workers. The
president did not come through. Unions recently made another effort
through the Senate Democrats, but that
failed, too. The
persistent problems that have been exposed since the Oct. 1
opening of the exchanges has done nothing to help the
situation.

Unions are not the only one-time supporters who have now turned
on Obamacare. Reason’s Nick Gillespie covered another
prominent advocate who recently abandoned ship.

In 2007, David Goldhill’s father was admitted to a New York City
hospital with pneumonia, and five weeks later he died there from
multiple hospital-acquired infections. “I probably would have been
like any other family member dealing with the grief and disbelief,”
says Goldhill, a self-described liberal Democrat who is currently
the CEO of the Game Show Network. “But,” as Goldhill recounts,

A month later there was
a profile in The New Yorker of physician Peter
Provonost, who was running around the country with fairly simple
steps for cleanliness and hygiene that could significantly reduce
the hospital-acquired infection rate, but he was having a hard time
getting hospitals to sign up for this. I had helped run a movie
chain, and we had a rule that if a soda spilled, it had to be
cleaned up in five minutes or someone got in trouble. And I thought
to myself, if we can do that to get you not to go to the theater
across the street, why are hospitals having such a hard time doing
simple cost-free things to save lives?

That’s how Goldhill first got interested in the economics of the
American health care system. In 2009, he published a much-discussed

article in The Atlantic, which he has now expanded
into a book, titled
Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My
Father–and How We Can Fix It.

View this article.

Yesterday, I wrote about how
President Barack Obama’s approach toward journalists while selling
the Affordable Care Act has arguably amounted to “working
the refs.” But there are some professional truth-slingers who
require no extra nudge–they’re here to tell you that Obamacare
critics are all wet, that maybe the president went a
wee bit too far with that whole you-can-keep-it stuff, but
that the more important thing is that these aren’t the health plans
you were looking for.

Here’s a sampling from the genre; bolding is mine to emphasize
apologia for presidential mendacity and other WTFery:

David Firestone, New York Times, “The
Uproar Over Insurance ‘Cancellation’ Notices“:

Most lawmakers mentioned President Obama’s unfortunate
blanket statement that all Americans would be allowed to
keep their insurance policies if they liked them. He failed to make
an exception for inadequate policies that don’t meet the new
minimum standards. […]

The so-called cancellation letters waved around at yesterday’s
hearing were simply notices that policies would have to be upgraded
or changed. Some of those old policies were so full of holes that
they didn’t include hospitalization, or maternity care, or coverage
of other serious conditions.

Republicans were apparently furious that government
would dare intrude on an insurance company’s freedom to offer a
terrible product to desperate people. […]

Luckily, a comprehensive and affordable insurance policy
is…now a basic right….Ms. Sebelius never lost her cool in
three-and-a-half hours of testimony, perhaps because she knows that
once the computer problems and the bellowing die down, the country
will be far better off.

Michael Hiltzik, Los
Angeles Times, “Obamacare
hysteria: Don’t believe the canceled insurance hype“:
 

We’re supposed to be scandalized by this, since
President Obama himself assured everyone that if they
liked their insurance they’d be able to keep it. […]

Back in March, Consumer Reports published a study of many of
these plans and placed them in a special category: “junk
health insurance.” Some plans, the magazine declared, may be
worse than none at all. […]

It’s time to tamp down the breathless indignation about these
health plan cancellations. Many of the departing plans are
being outlawed for good reason, and many of the customers
losing them have no idea how much financial exposure they were
saddled with in the old days. That’s the real scandal in American
health insurance, and Obamacare is designed, rightly, to fix
it.

Henry J. Aaron, New York Daily News,
“The
truth about those Obamacare coverage letters”:

Of late, numerous reports have told of people surprised by
letters telling them that insurance plans they now have will not be
renewed. Many are puzzled. Weren’t they told that if they like
their insurance they could keep it? Opponents of health reform in
general are seizing on the fact and asking in an accusatorial
manner: “Isn’t this a betrayal of trust?”

No. […]

[Obamacare] bars certain common practices of insurance companies
that most people find unacceptable at best, outrageous at
worst. […]

People should be no more shocked when substandard insurance
plans are removed from the market than they would be if food purity
legislation caused some products to be removed from a grocer’s
shelf. Obamacare is removing insurance products from the
market that are bad for your health.

“Terrible” insurance products that are “bad for your health” and
being “outlawed for good reason”? You might want to ask
Robert Laszewski about that.

Read Peter Suderman for more on how “The
Obama Administration’s Response to Insurance Plan Cancellations Is
Misleading and Condescending.” An excerpt from that:

The argument here, essentially, is that anyone whose plan gets
canceled didn’t really like his or her plan—that, even though the
beneficiary might not know it, the plan being canceled wasn’t worth
having anyway.

It’s a fundamentally condescending argument that makes a blanket
assumption that people don’t know whether or not they liked their
plan. It’s also a bunch of nonsense.

The administration can’t possibly know what sort of insurance
each and every individual likes or wants, and it can’t account for
the people who are losing plans that clearly did meet the needs of
the individuals who purchased them.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal‘s
James Taranto has a
piece making similar points to mine, and with more examples
worth reading.

On November 14, I’ll be moderating a talk by Paul Cantor at
George Mason University. The topic: “The
Economics of Apocalypse: Flying Saucers, Alien Invasions, and the
Walking Dead.”

Everywhere we look in pop culture today, the world is
coming to an end. Whether it’s the result of natural disasters,
alien invasions, or zombie plagues, our way of life is threatened
and our institutions are crumbling, leaving Americans to fend for
themselves (or prey upon each other).

Drawing upon his new book,
The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in
American Film and TV, University of Virginia Professor of
English Paul Cantor will discuss opposing visions of individualism
vs. collectivism in today’s catastrophe narratives.

The event will begin at 7:00 and end at 8:30. You can find us at
Founders Hall Auditorium on GMU’s Arlington campus, at 3351 Fairfax
Drive.

• Secretary of State
  John Kerry has said that sometimes NSA spying went too
  far.
• According to documents released by the House Oversight and
  Government Reform Committee,
  only 248 people enrolled in a health plan through
  healthcare.gov in the two days after it was launched.
• An
  increasing number of Saudi men are trying to help end Saudi
  Arabia’s ban on women driving.
• 
  German journalists have been urged by The German Federation of
  Journalists to avoid using Google and Yahoo because of recent
  reporting on snooping by British and American intelligence.
• China’s domestic security chief has blamed
  Uighur Islamists for the recent attack in Tiananmen
  square.
• 
  Liberal billionaires have been spending a lot of money on
  campaigns this year.

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Matthew McConaughey’s string of terrific
mid-career performances (most recently
in Mud and Magic Mike) reaches a
new peak in Dallas Buyers Club. Even better, says
Kurt Loder, McConaughey is matched here by Jared Leto, returning to
the screen after five years away and attaining a career high of his
own as a doomed drag queen. By contrast, Ender’s Game is
cold, overwrought, and surprisingly dull.

View this article.